Ukraine’s Election Crisis
Standoff Between US-Backed and Russian-Backed Candidatesby Lee Sustar
www.dissidentvoice.org
December 6, 2004
First Published in Socialist Worker

The
election standoff in Ukraine is portrayed in the U.S. media as a battle
between pro-Washington democrats and pro-Moscow authoritarians. But it’s
really a scramble for power within a ruling class dominated by corrupt
politicians and their wealthy backers.

It’s almost certainly the
case that the current government’s candidate for president, Prime Minister
Viktor Yanukovich--who has the high-profile support of Russian President
Vladimir Putin--stole the election with widespread fraud in the runoff
election November 21. But according to election observers, there were also
reports of fraud in the Western Ukrainian strongholds of Viktor Yushchenko,
a former prime minister who’s supported by the U.S. and the European Union
(EU).

Yushchenko’s supporters
captured the attention of the world by mobilizing 100,000 supporters in the
streets of the capital city of Kiev for more than a week, blockading
government buildings and calling for a general strike while demanding a new
election. Yet Yanukovich also had mass meetings in the eastern Ukrainian
city of Donetsk, the economic powerhouse of the country where the majority
of the population is Russian-speaking.

The election plays on the
historic divisions in Ukraine between the Russified East of the country and
the Ukrainian-speaking West, which has only been under Moscow’s rule since
1940, when Stalin’s USSR invaded and took over. But if the candidates have
played up such differences, it’s because their real policy differences are
minimal.

The notion that that the
crisis is simply Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine versus West Ukraine is
“pure nonsense,” Russian author and activist Boris Kagarlitsky told
Socialist Worker. “The key place where you have most of the resistance to
the government is Kiev, which is Russian-speaking,” he said. “In class
terms, it is petty bourgeois protests against the oligarchs of the East--and
the oligarchs are Russian-speaking. You cannot describe this in purely class
terms, unfortunately. Both sides are quite reactionary.”

Kagarlitsky compares the
mobilization to the “people power” mass protests in the Philippines in 2001,
which forced out one conservative government--and led to its replacement by
another.

Indeed, the crisis reflects
the battle within the Ukrainian ruling class over how to orient to both
Russia and the West. For example, Yanukovich, portrayed by the U.S. as a
lackey of Moscow, has sent 1,600 Ukrainian troops to Iraq and ordered the
Ukraine military to ferry NATO troops to Afghanistan.

And when a Russian steel
firm tried to buy out a major Ukrainian one for $1.2 billion, Yanukovich
blocked the deal and arranged for a sale to a Ukrainian government insider
for just $800 million. Yushchenko, by contrast, sold off four utility
companies to Russian-controlled companies.

If Yanukovich got Putin’s
backing, it’s in part because the Russian government concluded that the
current president, Leonid Kuchma, was going to help him steal the
election--and that it was better to go with a winner.

In his campaign, Yanukovich
made populist appeals by claiming that western Ukraine is a parasite on the
industrial East, which accounts for an estimated 80 percent of gross
domestic product.

Yushchenko, for all his
posturing as a democratic hero, is a former central banker who used his term
as prime minister to impose austerity measures that hit working people
hard--in a country where the average monthly wage was just $80 in 2002.

His top ally is Yulia
Tymoshenko, one of the country’s wealthiest oligarchs among the tiny circle
of former Communist Party members and industrial managers who won out in the
corrupt privatization of state industry when Ukraine became independent when
the USSR collapsed in 1991. As energy minister in Yushchenko’s government,
Tymoshenko used government power to squeeze her rivals until Kuchma forced
her out on corruption charges. Yushchenko himself was pushed out of office
in 2001 after trying to discipline the oligarchs with economic and political
reforms.

Today, Yushchenko plays to
the sentiments of millions of people fed up with corruption of Kuchma, who
was caught on audio tape in 2000 ordering the murder of an opposition
journalist. But as prime minister, Yushchenko himself was at the center of
Kuchma’s operation.

By mobilizing their base
and demanding the immediate ouster of Yanukovich, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko
have raised the stakes and risked the situation slipping out of their
control. Behind closed doors, however, they were negotiating a deal for a
new election or a power-sharing deal in which Yushchenko gains the
presidency while Yanukovich remains a power broker for the Eastern Ukraine.

“Everybody will be
happy--with the exceptions of those who demonstrated in the streets,”
Kagarlitsky said. However, he added, “it will be much harder to control
Ukraine when the new government comes to power. There is a genuine
democratic movement, and it is very much out of control of the current
leadership.”

What’s at stake for
Washington?

When U.S. Secretary of
State Colin Powell declared that the U.S. wouldn’t recognize the results of
Ukraine’s election, it was the capstone of Washington’s efforts to get
Viktor Yushchenko elected.

Following the model used
successfully in Serbia and Georgia and unsuccessfully in Belarus, much of
Yushchenko’s operation has been “funded and organized by the U.S.
government, deploying U.S. consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big
American parties and U.S. non-government organizations,” Britain’s Guardian
newspaper noted.

Representatives of the
Serbian student movement--who had extensive training from U.S.
government-funded outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy--set up
shop in Kiev during the election campaign.

Business Week explained why
the U.S. is interested. “With its vast swathe of fertile black earth and
well-educated population of 49 million, Ukraine is an emerging market worth
playing for.” As a major producer of steel and machinery, Ukraine is
benefiting enormously from demand in China. The economy is on track to grow
by at least 11 percent this year--the fastest in Europe--and the stock
market is up100 percent.

Nobody should be fooled by
the U.S. claims of supporting democracy in Ukraine. Washington has turned a
blind eye to election fraud across the former USSR--from Russia to the
oil-rich Central Asian states.

By trying to help
Yushchenko into office, the U.S. aims to pull Ukraine into Washington’s
orbit.

Russia meddles in former
empire

Moscow's attempt to
influence the outcome of the elections in Ukraine is an attempt to maintain
influence in its former empire.

The Ukrainian capital of
Kiev was home to the first “Russian” kingdom in the Middle Ages, but Ukraine
developed a distinct language and culture. With the rise of Moscow, Ukraine
was conquered by the expanding Russian Empire of the Tsars, with the western
region ultimately taken over by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In the Russian Revolution
of 1917, the Ukrainian struggle for national self-determination took center
stage. The first independent Ukraine was run by a pro-German monarch--and
the Ukrainian peasants swung behind the Communists in the civil war that
followed the revolution. Ukraine later joined the USSR as a republic equal
to Russia--but the dictator Stalin’s counterrevolution of the late 1920s
recentralized power in Moscow under a state capitalist regime.

Stalin’s forced
collectivization of agriculture caused a famine in Ukraine in the 1930s that
led to the deaths of 6 to 7 million people. Stalin effectively recast the
empire of the Tsars--and following the Second World War, used his troops to
bring Eastern European countries under Moscow’s control. Ukraine provided
much of the agricultural production--and the military-industrial complex--of
the USSR in the post-Stalin era.

The economic and political
reforms in the USSR in the late 1980s led first to revolutions in Eastern
Europe in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR itself two years later. Since
then, Ukraine, while still closely linked economically with Russia, has
gradually become more integrated with the West as well--setting the stage
for the current conflict.